Web Hosting recommendations

December 6, 2016

So you want a website, but what about web hosting? There are plenty of options to choose from when deciding how to host your website. This page should be informative and provide you with some basic information for choosing web hosting that’s most ideal for you.

Recommended shared web hosting providers

Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

Virtual Private Servers are great, and now they’re more affordable than they used to be. They used to cost upwards of $30 per month but now you can get them for as cheap as $5. You get your own virtual private space with root access, so you can do whatever you want on the servers, provided that your activities are within the terms of use of the provider, of course.

Pros

Root access to install whatever you want and do whatever you want—oh the power!

Only pay for your droplet’s uptime—if you destroy a VPS you don’t need to pay for it for the rest of the month.

Cons

Very barebones—you have to set up everything yourself so you should have a web developer or enjoy hanging around in the terminal while you learn how to manage your website or app. No fancy interfaces for the server, but many of the VPS providers have great interfaces.

Recommended Virtual Private Server (VPS) providers

Managed hosting is the most expensive option but it provides high-value to clients where website reliability is important, performance is important, and whose sites see a fair amount of traffic. Pricing for managed hosting starts at roughly $30 per month.

Pros

High-performance, thanks to the aggressive caching methods used

Protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks

CMS application core is kept up-to-date for you automagically

Allows for multiple environments, e.g. staging and production, so that you can work on your site in a sandboxed environment while ensuring users only see your site when you’re ready to launch

Great deployment tools in place for developers, often using Git, the most common version control system that all web developers nowadays should know

Cons

Higher costs may not be justifiable for businesses whose sites see little traffic, or for businesses that generate little revenue

Recommended managed hosting providers

Cheap or free hosting options for static websites

If you are building a static website or a client-side JavaScript application, you can host your project for quite cheap or even free. You’re usually quite limited with what you can host on these platforms, and usually you need to be quite technically-inclined to work with these options. These options are a perfect web hosting option for static websites and client-side JavaScript applications.

Pros

Very cheap or free

Very fast and high-performing because everything is static

Cons

Static websites and client-side apps will often require you to rely on web developers to update them (unless the content is served from an API, for which you would need to host separately)

You cannot host Content Management Systems like WordPress or Drupal using this type of service

You need a web developer to use these services as they are geared towards technical people